It was especially
the spectacle of men trampling on one another in the struggle for
wealth which roused Robert Crowley from the production of con-
troversial and religious tracts.
the spectacle of men trampling on one another in the struggle for
wealth which roused Robert Crowley from the production of con-
troversial and religious tracts.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v03
also, The Taming of a Shrew.
3 Vide Andrew Boorde, Dyetary of Helth, 1542; Bright, T. , Treatise of Melan-
cholie, 1586; T(homas) Walkington), The Opticke Glasse of Humors, 1605.
Epistulae obscurorum Virorum, 1st series, Mugister Conradus ad magistrum
Ortuinum Gratium.
## p. 92 (#114) #############################################
92 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
1
in sympathy with Plutarch, Plautus and Cicero: that is to say, of
jokes, witticisms, repartees and clinches. Thus, a large number of
Latin Facetiae appeared in print from the pens of fifteenth and
sixteenth century scholars. The style of narrative is strikingly
similar to the collections of Exempla, with which the Lativists,
thanks to their semi-ecclesiastical education, would be familiar.
These bons-mots and anecdotes diverted the student and the con-
troversialist by touches of common life or, at the most, by flashes
of classical wit. Their triviality ensured relaxation, but the scholar's
attention was held by an appeal to his sense of paradox and epigram.
This interest in witticisms and anecdotes soon spread to the
middle classes, whose habit of mind had for centuries been formed
by story-telling. The jongleurs and trouvères had preserved
‘those popular tales, which from time immemorial had circulated
among nations of Indo-European descent' and which continued to
find a place in all subsequent miscellanies down to the eighteenth
century. Ever since the Franciscans and Dominicans had used
apologues to enforce their exhortations, collections of Exempla
had been compiled from such sources as Vitae Patrum and
the Legends of the Saints. Gesta Romanorum had supplied
tales, mostly romantic, from obsolete Latin chronicles and German
legends. The sixteenth century still encouraged the medieval
love of the marvellous and heroic, but it also gave great impulse
to the half cynical, half amused indulgence which had always
greeted the triumphs of the knave, the blunders of the fool, the
flashes of the quick-witted and the innumerable touches of often
undignified nature which make the whole world kin. This in-
creased interest in the vagaries of one's neighbour was partly due
to the spread of education, which brought into clearer relief the
different grades of intelligence and stupidity. It also arose from the
growth of the city population, where legal maladministration often
reduced daily intercourse to a trial of wits. Moreover, the townsman
felt, though in a less degree than the scholar, the need for the relaxa-
tion of social intercourse. The minstrel and jester made a livelihood
and sometimes rose to fame? by gratifying this unromantic curiosity
in life; but the publication of Latin Facetiae had shown how
their place could be taken by jest-books printed in the native tongue.
These jest-books, in Italy, France, England and Germany, drew
largely on each other and even more on the inexhaustible stores
of the past, eschewing romantic and religious sentiment and
1 Courthope, History of English Poetry, vol. I, p. 63.
E. g. Scogan, Tarlton and Archie.
## p. 93 (#115) #############################################
>
Jest-books
93
reproducing only wit, ribaldry, satire and realism. The earliest
English jest-book, previous to most of the German miscellanies,
was in print by about 1526 under the title of A C. Mery Talys. This
miscellany covers practically the same ground as the Fabliaux,
treating of the profligacy of married women, the meanness and
voluptuousness of the priesthood, the superstition and crassitude of
the peasant, the standing jokes against feminine loquacity and
obstinacy, the resources of untutored ingenuity and the comedy of
the fool outwitted by the knave. All the tales are narrated with
a pointedness and simplicity which show how well English narrative
prose had learnt its lesson from Latin. Some of the anecdotes, to
modern taste, are merely silly or obscene. But a certain number,
following in the footsteps of the Latin Facetiae, harbour a sense
of wit and subtlety beneath apparent crudity. A more pro-
nounced leaning towards the new humanism is seen in Mery Tales
and Quicke Answeres (1535). The compiler draws less on medieval
stories and puts some of Poggio's facetiae and the tales of Erasmus's
Convivium Fabulosum and a selection from his Apophthegmata?
within reach of English readers. Latin quotations illustrate some
of the anecdotes, and the reflections, with which ‘jests' are fre-
quently concluded (probably in imitation of Exempla) are, in
some cases, more discursive. The twenty-eighth story ends with a
disquisition on dreams which already anticipates the essay.
Anecdotes and repartees, closely related to conversation and
practical jokes, tended to be associated with a personality. Joci
et Sales . . . ab Ottomaro Luscinio had appeared in 1529, and Facetie
et motti arguti di alcuni eccellentissimi ingegni et nobilissimi
signori, collected by Lodovico Dominichi, was published in 1548.
Following the example of the continent, English compilers soon
found it advantageous to put their jests and cranks on the market
associated with some character famous for humour or knavery.
Thus, we have the Merie Tales of Master Skelton, in which a
collection of extravagant anecdotes, associated with the laureate's
personality and his rectorship of Diss, is used to introduce clerical
burlesque such as the people loved. But the most perfect type
of biographical jest-book was registered in 1565–6, under the
title The Geystes of Skoggan. The kind of exploit which the
Fabliaux attributed to the 'clerc' is now attributed to the house-
hold jester. Amazing tales of dishonesty, insolence, and knavery
are collected from native and foreign sources, including two from
1 Vide De Vocht, H. , De Invloed van Erasmus op de Engelsche l'ooneelliteratur der
XVIe en XVIIe eeuwen. Ghent, 1908.
>
## p. 94 (#116) #############################################
94 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
the Markolf legend and one (in later editions) from Brantôme.
Several had already appeared in Mery Tales and Quicke Answeres.
These are skilfully woven into a continuous narrative, marking
definite progress in the scamp's career from his student days at
Oxford to a position at the courts of two monarchs, and thence
to his death. These licentious antics were probably not accept-
able, even in the rude and profligate court of Edward IV, in whose
reign the historic Scogan lived. But the jest-book was becoming
more democratic under German influence and pictured the priest-
hood and the nobility only as accessories to the buffoonery of low
life. So welcome was this coarser, more plebeian humour that
German jest-books were put on the market in English translations.
Der Pfarrer von Kalenberg was translated and adapted to English
ideas about 1510 and Eulenspiegell was translated from an
abridged Antwerp edition by William Copland under the title
of Howleglass, while the same printer produced an English
version of the old Danish tale of Rausch as Friar Rush. Such
tales as Skoggan's and Howleglass are a link between the jester
and the adventurer whose career was becoming a part of the
people's reading. Contempt for the routine of daily life is un-
mistakable. Howleglass's biographer goes so far as to say: 'Men
let alone and take no hede of cunning men yt dwel bi them; but
prefer them a litle or nought for ther labour nor be beloved: but
rural persones and vacabundes have all their desyre. ' In such
a sentiment, the levelling tendency of democracy has already
grown into sympathy with the picaro. But these gestes have no
literary kinship with Lazarillo de Tormes. Neither Howleglass,
The Parson of Kalenborowe, Skoggan nor Skelton has the in-
dividuality which suggests the novel. Moreover, they still move in
the distorted world of caricature, where the stupid are incredibly
stupid, and the lucky unnaturally lucky. In France, the jest-
book became a vehicle for all the wisdom and satire at Rabelais's
command. But in England, the fermentation of the age found
expression through other channels, and the jest-books only helped
to prepare the way for the detached literature of the seven-
teenth century by appealing to a sense of humour, wit and verbal
subtlety.
This sense found its fullest scope in criticism and ridicule.
Again, the literature of the sixteenth century, not yet conscious of
itself, had recourse to the past. Satires against certain localities
are among the features of the Middle Ages, when decentralisation
i Ste ante, p. 82. On the Eulenspiegel cycle, see Herford, C. H. , op. cit. chap. v.
## p. 95 (#117) #############################################
Riddles and Broadsides
95
gave counties and even towns the isolation of a separate country.
A monk of Peterborough in the twelfth or thirteenth century
satirised the inhabitants of Norfolk"; while satires are also found
concerning the people of Stockton and Rochester, and, at a later
period, on the inhabitants of Pevensey. 'Merry tales' were com-
posed or compiled on these lines for readers sufficiently intellectual
to laugh at folly. Germany set the example by producing, in the
sixteenth century, a collection of witticisms on Schildburg: the
inhabitants of this famous town are represented as experiencing
so much inconvenience from their far-famed wisdom that they
determine to establish a reputation for folly, a reputation which
still lives. A similar method of unifying anecdotes of stupidity
was adopted by the English in the reign of Henry VIII, when
Merie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotam appeared. The same type
of humour took a slightly different form in The Sack-Full of News,
a collection, mostly of bucolic ineptitudes, compiled for city readers
in an age when Barclay could say to the countryman: 'even the
townsmen shall laugh you to scorn. '
Jest-books did not efface a kindred form of miscellany-books
of riddles. Wynkyn de Worde printed Demaundes joyous, which
.
was chiefly an abridgment of Les demandes joyeuses; and the
Booke of Merry Riddles probably appeared before the earliest
known edition of 1600. These questions and answers enjoyed no
mean consideration as a mental training? , and, undoubtedly, helped
to form the standard of wit and conceit in later Elizabethau and
Jacobean times. The riddle books are full of such questions as:
"What is that that shineth bright of day and at night is raked up
in its own dirt? '—'The fire'; 'What is it that getteth his living
backward? '—'The ropemaker'; 'Of what faculty be they that
every night turn the skins of dead beasts? '—'The friars. ' In the
character writers, we meet with the same type of wit, only, in
them, it is reversed. Thus, in the Overbury collection, we read that
a serving man is a creature who, though he be not drunk, yet is not
his own man, and that the daily labour of a waterman teaches
him the art of dissembling because he goes not the way he looks.
In Micrologia, 'a player. . . is much like a counter in arithmetic and
may stand one while for a king, another while a beggar, many
times as a mute or cipher. In Butler, 'a melancholy man is one
that keeps the worst company in the world, that is, his own. '
1 Cf. Wright, T. , Early Mysteries and other Latin Poems, 1838.
This tendency begins to be marked before the sixteenth century by such books
as Mensa philosophica and Liber Paceti.
## p. 96 (#118) #############################################
96 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
The primary object of these anecdotes, facetiae and riddles was
to occupy idle hours. The English miscellanies are always 'merry';
and the foreign jest-books have even more suggestive titles. This
natural inclination for amusement, in which even elderly students
took refuge from over-work, had come down to the sixteenth cen-
tury with a love of singing and dancing? By 1510, Erasmus
declared that Britanni, praeter alia, formam, musicam et lautas
mensas, proprie sibi vindicent. Miles Coverdale”, in 1538, testifies
that the taste for singing was universal among carters, ploughmen
and women 'at the rockes' and spinning wheel. Words in metre
were composed to give a fuller zest to music and dancing, but the
conditions of their production were quite different from those
which evolved the folk-lore balladº. The change was inevitable
from the time the minstrel left the baronial hall for the city square.
The transformation became complete so soon as the invention of
printing made it more profitable to sell ballads than to sing them.
These fly-leaves and broadsides, specially produced for the occasion
and sold for a penny, have nearly all perished. Popular ones
were pasted on the wall and the less valued were devoted to more
ephemeral purposes. Both destinies led to annihilation, but the
demand for them must have grown rapidly, for, in the second decade
of the sixteenth century, the author of the Interlude of the Nature
of the Four Elements complains of the toys and trifles' printed in
his time; so that, while in English there were scarcely 'any works
of connynge,' the most ‘pregnant wits' were employed in compiling
'ballads and other matters not worth a mite. ' Henry VIII encour-
aged such productions in the early part of his reign but suppressed
them wholesale when any part of his policy was attacked. In 1533,
a proclamation was issued to suppress ‘fond books, ballads, rimes
and other lewd treatises in the English tongue. ' In 1543, an act of
parliament was passed to put a stop to the circulation of 'printed
ballads, plays, rimes, songs and other fantasies. ' 'At the beginning
of Mary's reign, an edict was made against ‘books, ballads, rimes
and treatises' which had been 'set out by printers and stationers,
of an evil zeal for lucre and covetous of vile gain. These sup-
pressions, added to the perishable nature of the product, have
destroyed all but about fifty-six ballads of the reigns from
Henry VIII to Elizabeth. But, by 1556, the Stationers' company
was incorporated and the development and nature of this primitive
>
1 See Chappell, W. , Popular Music of the Olden Time, vol. I, p. 253.
9 Encomium Moriae.
8 Address unto the Christian reader.
4 See vol. II, chap. XVII.
## p. 97 (#119) #############################################
Transition of Society
97
journalism is more easily traceable. From about 1560 to 1570,
about forty ballad-printers are registered, but, here again, the bulk
of their output has perished. The vast number of broadsides that
have come down to us belong to later periods, and owe their
existence to the labours of private collectors such as Selden,
Harley, Bagford and Pepys. Some of those still extant, which
date from the first two decades of Elizabeth's reign, continue the
spirit of the jest-books or reflect the sentiment of the 'botes'
and 'fraternityes,' but the greater number are akin to the new
spirit of Elizabethan and Jacobean times? .
We have seen in the foregoing summary how large a rearling
public still remained untouched by the renascence, and continued
to enjoy medieval literature, borrowing freely from France and
Germany. But, at the same time, the great social changes of the
sixteenth century were inspiring a large number of quite different
tracts. Trade was encouraged by both the Henrys, and the growing
taste for luxury, which ruined the gentry, enriched the commercial
classes. Moreover, the discovery of the New World added im-
mensely to the opportunities of making money. This commercial
activity seemed, to the moralists of the age, to be a rupture with
the good traditions of the past. In 1540–50, was printed
Charles Bansley’s Pryde and Abuse of Women, which belongs to
quite a different world of satire from that of The Schole-house of
Women or The Proude Wyves Paternoster. The coarse, picturesque
narrative is gone and, with it, the rough humour and caricature.
Bansley's invective is a sermon in verse.
He views female failings
in the light of the Seven Deadly Sins, and lashes their ostenta-
tion and vanity as Romish and inspired by the Devil. At
about the same time, a dialogue called The Booke in Meeter
of Robin Conscience was printed, in which Conscience remonstrates
first with his father, whose aim is to have abundance of worldly
treasure, then with his mother Neugise, who follows French
fashions and dresses like one nobly born, whereas the wife of
the previous century would never have ventured to rival the
gentlewoman's finery, and, lastly, with his sister, Proud Beauty,
who has mastered the essentials of cosmetics and delights to 'colly
and kis. '
A class which increases in wealth and importance does not
1 Broadside ballads are still sung in the streets of Paris during public holidays, and
can be heard any night at Les quat-z-arts and Le Grillon. As in former tinies, they
are the best indication of popular sentiment. The same survival is found in London
in the nineteenth century. Vide Hindley, C. , History oj the Cutnach Press, 1886.
E. L. III.
7
CH. V.
## p. 98 (#120) #############################################
98 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
stand still. Burghers began to marry their sons and daughters to
insolvent nobility, and Henry, who aimed at creating an aristocracy
dependent on himself, frequently recruited the diminished ranks of
the old peers from among burghers, lawyers and borough magis-
trates. This growth of the royal court at the expense of the
feudal castle filled London with raw courtiers", drawn from all
classes, who attached themselves to men of influence, partly to see
the world, and partly to advance their own fortunes under shelter
of a great name. Such a suddenly enriched or ennobled society
was not likely to be reconciled to the simple, rough life of their
forefathers. Luxury and excitement became necessities and re-
ceived their comment in contemporary literature. In 1530, the
Address in verse to new-fanglers was prefixed to Chaucer's
Assembly of Fowls. Wynkyn de Worde issued three editions of
A Treatise of a Gallant, which laments the pride, avarice and
ambition of the new fledged courtier and his love of quarrel. , The
tract deplores the influx of foreigners, whose phraseology was
corrupting the purity of the English idiom, and censures the
Englishman's admiration for French customs and French vices. At
this time, the example of Henry VIII and his sister Margaret made
dice and card-playing fashionable and the pleasures of gambling
gave great opportunities to the gentleman thief, who now became
a perpetual menace to society, and, in 1532, apparently, was
printed a Manifest detection of the most vyle and detestable
use of dice play and other practices like the same. This tract is
one of the first great exposures of the age, throwing into relief the
practices and resources of those who fall 'from the hardness of
virtuous living to the delicacy and boldness of uncareful idleness
and gainfull deceit. ' We learn how the provincial is met at Paul's
by a gentleman with three or four servants in gay liveries, an
acquaintance is cleverly established, the 'couzin' is unwittingly intro-
duced to the gaming-house and, eventually, he is fleeced. Elaborate
tricks to entice the 'couzin' with different kinds of cogged dice,
even the name of the most reliable maker, canting terms, the mode
of making cards and other forms of imposture and thievery, are all
made public. These disclosures are presented in a lively dialogue,
in clear, simple English. The sixteenth century love of anecdote
is gratified and the conversation is carried on between two well-
defined characters, the one a raw courtier, the other an ex-
perienced man of the world.
1 Cf. a poem by Richard Edwards in The Paradyse of Daynty Devises, beginning
In Youthfull yeares when first my young desires began
To pricke me forth to serve in court.
## p. 99 (#121) #############################################
Brinkelow's Complaynt of Roderyck Mors 99
as
The triumph of the reformation under Henry VIII and the
suppression of the monasteries had raised great hopes in those
churchmen who looked on Rome as the root of all evil. But the
disorganisation of society always brings abuses to the surface and
the venality of judges, the chicanery and delays of law-suits, the
tyranny of the powerful and the oppression of the poor and
defenceless now became doubly apparent. The prevailing clear-
sightedness as to the evils of both past and present found vigorous
expression in Brinkelow's Complaynt of Roderyck Mors. Brinke-
low's sectarian hatred of popery precludes the slightest regret for
the abolition of the old religion; in fact, he laments that the ‘body
and tayle of the pope is not banisshed with his name. ' At the
same time, his sense of justice and righteousness keeps his eyes
open to the fact that ecclesiastical and state administration' are no
better under the new order and that the social conditions are a great
deal worse. A marked feature of the tract is the constant appeal
to the king's divine authority to rectify social and legal abuses.
Henry's practice differed greatly from the ideas of his conscientious
supporters. The riches he appropriated from the monasteries
were not devoted to the relief of the economic situation,
Brinkelow urged him to use them (chap. XXII). Part went to the
king's middle class favourites, who now availed themselves of the
fall of noble families and the eviction of abbey-lands, to speculate
in agriculture and buy country estates. This upstart squirearchy
knew nothing of the old baronial practice of hospitality, and the
passing away of the ancient ideal added, in some measure, to the
pessimism of the times. Some ballads have come down to us
lamenting the new order, such as John Barker's, printed 1561,
with the burden :
Neibourhed nor love is none,
Treu dealyng now is fled and gone.
Besides neglecting the claims of good fellowship, the nouveau
riche introduced methods of commercial competition into land
speculation. The rearing of cattle was found to be more profitable
than the leasing of farms? . Thus, neither the lords of the manor
nor freehold tenants hesitated, when it was advantageous, to
abolish the small homesteads that had supported the yeomanry
1 Chap. XII, That kynges and lordes of presons should fynd their presoners suffycyent
fode at their charge : and of men that have lyen long in preson, &cete, is one of the first
signs of a literature which, in the next century, was to include The Blacke Dogge of
Newgate (c. 1600), The Compters Common-Wealth (1617), Essayes and Characters of a
Prison and Prisoners (1618), by Mynshul, and Wil Bagnal's Ghost (1655).
2 Traill, Social England, vol. II, chap. IX.
## p. 100 (#122) ############################################
100 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
of baronial England. Evicted tenants were forced to become
vagabonds or seek a livelihood in manufacturing industries, thus
further disorganising the labour market; and, all this while, the
reckless extravagance of the court raised the general cost of living,
and the debasement of the currency and increase of taxation made
poverty more acute.
Amid such disorder and suffering the modern spirit of com-
petition was ushered into the world, and contemporary literature
could see little but evil in the period of transition.
It was especially
the spectacle of men trampling on one another in the struggle for
wealth which roused Robert Crowley from the production of con-
troversial and religious tracts. Crowley was a printer, a puritan
and a famous preacher. Most of his pamphlets, sermons and
answers are composed for theologians; but the reading public was
sufficiently large and the influence of the press sufficiently universal
to make it worth his while to address the whole commons of the
realm in five popular tracts. In 1550, he boldly exposed the more
glaring social and moral abuses of the time in a series of short
verse essays, arranged in alphabetical order and entitled The
one and thirty epigrams. But, in spite of these devices, his
standpoint remains that of a Hebrew prophet and his style that of
a preacher. In The Voice of the Last Trumpet, which appeared in
the same year, he shows even more clearly how far his sectarian
training had unfitted him to handle problems of progress or social
reform. The tract is a methodical appeal to the different classes to
lay aside their peculiar sins; his view is still that of the Middle Ages,
and God is supposed to have placed barriers between the classes?
which no individual can cross without sin. Crowley warns his
readers not to stray from their class, but to let the gentry cultivate
learning, the commons obedience, and all will be well. In 1550, he
also printed The way to wealth, a graphic and searching enquiry
into the mutual hatred and distrust which existed between the rich
and the poor, showing how peasants attribute the late seditions to
farmers, graziers, lawyers, merchants, gentlemen, knights and lords,
while the upper classes—'the gredie cormerauntes ’-point to the
wealth and insolence of the peasantry. But he sternly warns the
lower classes against disobedience and covetousness, bidding them
be patient and not usurp the functions of their rulers. He rebukes
the clergy—“the shephardes of thys church'—for their lust of wealth,
11
1 Even in Dances of Death, such as that painted on the wall of the church of
La Chaise Dieu in Auvergne, and that at Basel, each individual takes precedence
according to his class. Wright, T. , History of Caricature and Grotesque, chap. XIII.
## p. 101 (#123) ############################################
6
The Hye Way to the Spyttel Hous IOT
but reserves his sharpest censure for the rich men who tyrannise
over the commons. In the following year he produced Pleasure
and pain, heaven and hell, an even more direct protest against
competition or, as Crowley calls it, the gredy rakeyng togyther of
the treasures of this vayne worlde,' which was widening the gulf
between rich and poor. Still writing for the large reading public,
he couched his expostulation in the attractive form of a poem
representing Christ's address to the world on the Last Judgment
Day. But the most interesting of Crowley's tracts is the In-
formacion and Peticion agaynst the oppressours of the pore
commons of this realme. In this address to the parliament of
Edward VI, the preacher fulminates against the rich in the language
of the Psalms and Isaiah. He draws a powerful picture of the
misery caused by the aggressions of the wealthy: how poverty makes
slaves of men and drudges or prostitutes of women, how youths are
reduced to beggary and, in the end, 'garnysh the galowe trees. '
Crowley had neither the intellectual equipment nor the literary
talent necessary to illuminate the perplexity and suffering of his
age. His five tracts simply give voice to the thoughts of those who
looked backward and cried 'order,' when they felt that the times
were out of joint.
In these and similar pamphlets one thing particularly arrests
the attention—the continual references to the ever increasing class
of beggars and vagabonds. As early as 1528, Simon Fish begins his
Supplication with these tremendous words :
Most lamentably compleyneth theyre wofull mysery unto youre highnes
youre poore daily bedemen, the wretched hidous monstres (on whome scarcely
for horror any yie dare loke), the foule unhappy sorte of lepres and other sore
people, nedy, impotent, blinde, lame and sike, that live onely by almesse, howe
that theyre nombre is daily so sore encreased that all the almesse of all the
weldisposed people of this youre realme is not halfe ynough for to susteine
theim.
The historic class of outlaws, vagabonds and pilgrims had
been enormously increased by the victims of falling prices and
decaying guilds. The phenomenon forces itself on the attention of
Robert Copland, who printed and probably composed The Hye Way
to the Spyttel Hous, after 1531. No work more clearly illustrates
the transitional state of English literature. Copland describes
himself as taking shelter from the rain in the porch of a spyttel
house and interrogates the porter on the inmates. The author
really wishes to describe the different types of fools and knaves;
but, instead of grouping them under a fraternity, boat or testament,
he chooses the spyttel house to serve as a frame, the picture con-
a
## p. 102 (#124) ############################################
102 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
taining those who knock for entrance. Under this heading, nearly
all the lower types of humanity are classed, not only the idle and
the lascivious, but busybodies and those who refuse to forgive their
neighbours or discipline their servants; even idle and domineering
wives are also among those who visit the hospital. Thus, in its
main conception, the book belongs to the general body of early
sixteenth century satire. But the tract is profoundly coloured by
the element of beggary. A hospital would not have been chosen as a
substitute for the traditional background unless poverty was a very
general curse, and we have a ghastly picture of the destitute
wretches who crave admission. In the first part of the dialogue,
the porter gives some amusing and graphic anecdotes of the tricks
of sham beggars, thus showing that Copland had caught a glimpse
of the boundless fields of comedy and humour which form part of
the realm of roguery.
Such was the state of the poor while the religious houses still
stood, but the suppression of the monasteries added to the army
of the unemployed and, at the same time, deprived the destitute of
the alms which had been expressly given in trust for them. Those
who had formerly looked to the religious houses for help were now
thrown upon society ; mendicancy became a recognised fact; and
legislation, while suppressing vagabondism, instituted compulsory
relief for the poor and needy. Such a system, badly administered
in a time of social disorganisation, led to inevitable abuse.
Pauperism became a profession exercised by ingenious impostors,
who perverted the administration of charity and, when occasion
offered, robbed travellers, stole horses out of pastures and hooked
linen out of house windows.
Vagabondism was a menace to society, and the curiosity which
people feel in anything alarming was satisfied in 1561 by Awdeley's
Fraternitye of vacabones. Again we see the power of literary
tradition. Awdeley, apparently, found no more appropriate title
than one as old as Wireker; but those who expected a satire on
social types assembled under this denomination were disappointed.
Under an old name, he followed up the idea of the German
Liber Vagatorum, and produced an anatomy of vagabond life
and vagrancy. The tract is divided into two parts; the first
consists of a series of concise definitions of thieves' cant and
contains startling revelations, how the “Abraham man' walks this
earth feigning madness and calling himself Poor Tom', how the
washman' lies in the highway with artificial sores produced by
i Compare King Lear, Act 11, sc. 4.
6
## p. 103 (#125) ############################################
Awdeley and Harman
103
spickwort or ratsbane and how these and suchlike impostors have
not only their own language but are organised into an independent
community with the 'upright man’ at their head, who domineers
over the society and takes the lion's share of the booty.
The most jejune of descriptions would be welcome when ac-
companied, as these were, by sensational disclosures of a mysterious
and dangerous class. But, in the second part—the company of
‘cousoners' and shifters-Awdeley deals with three types of the
gentleman thief. Here, the definitions which reveal the insidious
refinements of the well dressed adventurer necessarily expand into
narrative; but Awdeley was quite unconscious that he had found a
vein of humour and episode which has not even yet been exhausted.
His tales are concise explanations of a process of deception; his
only object is to give information.
All the opportunities which Awdeley missed are turned to the
fullest account by Thomas Harman. The writer, who describes
himself as a 'poore gentleman,' sought to supply the place of the sup-
pressed monasteries by keeping open house for mendicants. In
this charitable spirit, he came into personal contact with almost
every type of pauper, and gradually discovered that his compassion
was generally lavished on professional impostors. Having pene-
trated their depe dissimulation and detestable dealynge, beinge
marvellous suttle and craftye in their kynde,' he gave his dis-
coveries to the world in A Caveat or Warening for Commen
Corsetors, vulgarely called Vagabones. The book is put forward
as an 'alarum' to forewarn honest citizens; but, in reality, it
contains the researches of a sociologist. Harman alludes rather
ungratefully to Awdeley's superficial outline as 'A small breefe. . .
that made a lytle shewe of there names and usage, and gave a
glymsinge lyghte, not sufficient to perswade of their pevishe
peltinge. ' In twenty-four chapters, varying in length from a few
lines to several pages, Harman accumulated important data out of
which the character of thesixteenth century thief may be constructed.
We learn something as to their dress, food, origin, training and sexual
relations. The different departments of a highly specialised profes-
sion are explained. Their complicated frauds are fully investigated,
and we catch glimpses of the dark shallows of their private life. With
the instinct of a scientist, the author appends a list of the chief thieves
then living, and gives specimens and translations of their slang.
This spirit of philosophical enquiry is the first sign of modern
thought in a popular tract. But, in other respects, Harman's
work has the characteristics of his own age. He was writing for
## p. 104 (#126) ############################################
104 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
the public which read A C. Mery Tales and The Geystes of Skoggan;
so his book is enlivened with curious stories in illustration of thieves'
practices. The principle of recommending exposures to the masses
has been formulated by Erasmus quoniam autem rudis ac simplex
aetas huiusmodi fraudibus potissimum est obnoxia, visum est
exemplo non inamoeno depingere modum imposturae'. But
Harman has his full share of sympathy for a piece of successful
knavery, and he loves an episode which hinges on a trial of wits.
His anecdotes mark a pronounced advance on the stories of the
jest-books. The actors are no longer chessmen, who automatically
bring about a situation; they are living characters, and the author
adds to the interest of his book by interweaving personal ex-
periences with his pictures of mendicant life. In such stories as
that of the 'Roge' (cap. IV) and the 'Walking Morte' (cap. XIX), his
curiosity as to the eccentricities and humour of villainy effaces his
mission as an exposer of abuses.
Awdeley's and Harman's books, together with Liber Vagatorum,
have influenced a whole class of literature, from Greene's 'conny-
catching pamphlets' to The Prince and the Pauper. And yet
the Caveat does not anticipate the spirit of the picaresque novel.
Though attracted by knavery, Harman has no toleration for the
knave. 'Lewtering Luskes, lasy Lorells, rowsey ragged rabblement
of rakehells' are amongst his designations for this class, and his only
methods for 'reforming the criminal' are the stocks and the whip.
It is worth noticing that this work, a pamphlet of unquestioned
merit, is free from the literary ideals of the court. Harman
alludes contemptuously to this delycat age, and disclaims all
pretensions to eloquence, declaring that he has set forth his work
‘symplye and truelye, with such usual words and termes as is
among us wel known and frequented.
While the social miseries of England were inspiring a whole
literature of narrative and exposure, the sixteenth century spirit of
cosmopolitanism was also finding popular expression. Curiosity with
regard to other countries was by no means a creation of the age. The
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries produced short Latin descrip-
tions of the characteristics of different nations, and a series of pen
and ink caricatures of the Irish, Welsh and Gascons are found in
the margin of a document of the time of Edward I. But popular
interest in the continent received a new impulse during the sixteenth
century. The immigration of foreigners had, by 1517, become a
marked feature of Euglish commercial life, and the period from 1512
1 Preface to Colloquia familiaria.
## p. 105 (#127) ############################################
Cosmopolitanism. Andrew Boorde
Boorde 105
>
to 1558 is one of tentative exploration, which, though it produced no
startling mercantile discoveries, accustomed England to the idea of
the expansion of Europe, and helped to produce a revolt against
insnlarity. As early as The Nature of the Four Elements, de-
claringe many proper poynts of philosophy naturall and of dyvers
strange landys and of dyvers straunge effects and causes,' we have
a conception of cosmography serving as a basis for a morality
play. The production, apparently, found no imitators. But the
broadening of the national outlook is proved by the ever-increasing
number of allusions to foreign countries, in the tracts of the
timel.
The growth of cosmopolitan ideas found its expression in a
collection of essays on the chief nationalities and kingdoms of
Europe composed by the traveller and physician Andrew Boorde.
This work was finished by 1542, but was not published until 1547,
under the significant title of The Fyrste Boke of the Introduction
of Knowledge. Again we find a work of considerable merit pro-
bably intended to preface a universal encyclopaedia and yet
produced for a public which had not completely dissociated
popular literature from the grotesqueries of the former age.
Each chapter begins with a prologue in doggerel verse, spoken
by a typical member of the country under discussion, and illus-
trated by one of Copland's stock woodcuts. These verses are
intended to portray, and, in some cases, to caricature, what is
typical of each nation. Thus, the Englishman stands naked,
musing on what clothes he shall wear; the Fleming cheerfully
admits that he is sometimes 'drunken as a rat'; the Cornishman
expresses himself in half intelligible English; the Bohemian stands
by Wyclif and cares nothing for the pope; the Venetian is repre-
sented with money to pacify the Turks and the Jews. But the
Introduction is not merely a forerunner of the modern cartoon.
Verse and prose are intermingled as in Thomas's Historye of
Italye ; the doggerel prologues are followed by prose descriptions
in which the author discusses the geographical situation, the
produce and the ‘naturall dysposicion, that is to say, the culture,
religion and customs, of the inhabitants. He ends each enquiry
with information on the coinage, sometimes with a few specimens
of the language, and, in one or two cases, with directions for travel.
Like much of the popular literature of the sixteenth century, the
2
>
>
1 Such as Supplication for the Beggars, Complaynt of Roderyck Mors, Dialogue
between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset (n. d. ), Rede me and be not wrothe (1528), The
Boke named the Governour (1531), eto. , eto.
## p. 106 (#128) ############################################
106 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
Introduction stands between two ages ; it still retains the coarse
laughter and credulity of the past. Boorde believes that Merlin
built Stonehenge, and gravely records the legend of the White
Cock and Hen of St Domingo. But, at the same time, he has the
observation of an age conscious of progress. He notices the
advance of civilisation in different lands, and he understands
the importance of a country's natural resources. The economical
situation interests him; he observes that England is the land of
capital, and that Spain depends on her sea trade for wealth. He
has an eye for the poverty of people who, like the Welsh, are
still sunk in the squalor and ignorance of the Middle Ages. Any-
thing striking about the government attracts him, and the religious
situation frequently receives comment. And yet he has the indi-
vidualist's love of peculiarities. He notices the Irishman's device
for cooking, he reads that the Flemings eat frogs' legs and that
the Genoese are high in the instep.
Besides satisfying men’s curiosity in foreign lands, Boorde put
his medical knowledge and experience within reach of the unin-
itiated, by A Compendyous Regyment or a Dyetary of Helth. This
treatise on the cultivation of health, one of the earliest composed in
English, shows how quickly knowledge was spreading through the
middle classes. It was an age when the government insisted on
quarantine but neglected sanitation, and when Harrison believed
that the soot and smoke of chimneyless houses hardened the con-
stitution. Boorde was one of the first to see how greatly sanitation
influenced the well-being of man. The first part of his Dyetary,
really a separate treatise, shows how the secret of health is to
choose a convenient site or one's house. But the most striking
feature of his system deals with the reaction of the mind on the
body? In placing his house, a man should choose a congenial
prospect,
for and the eye be not satysfyed, the mynde cannot be contented. And the
mynde cannot be contented the herte cannot be pleased: if the herte and
mynde be not pleased nature doth abhor. And yf nature do abhor, morty-
fycacyon of the vytall and anymall and spyrytuall powers do consequently
foiowe.
In the second part of his treatise, Boorde gives practical advice
on such matters as sleeping, exercise and dress. He includes
an exhaustive examination of diet; but most of his purely
medical knowledge is still traditional. Yet, in scope and method,
>
Epistolae
1 Cf. Medici dicunt etiam quod sanum est quando aliquis est laetus.
Obscurorum Virorum, vol. I, ep. 9. Magister Conradus de Zuiccavia.
## p. 107 (#129) ############################################
William Bullein
107
the book is an effort to shake off the ignorance of the past and
apply to practical life the learning gathered in universities.
Boorde was not the only physician who advanced the culture
of his age. In those days, chirurgeons and doctors were, men of
general knowledge. Thomas Vicary insists that, besides his pro-
fessional training, a chirurgeon should be versed in natural
philosophy, grammar, rhetoric and abstract science. John Halle
adds astronomy, natural history and botany to the list. These
sciences were needed to equip the practitioner with the skill and
ability to put his own art to the fullest use. And thus the
physician kept in touch with the knowledge of his time. Robert
Recorde, said to have been physician to Edward VI and Mary,
wrote dialogues on arithmetic, geography, mensuration, astrology,
astronomny and algebra. But no writer has embodied so much
sentiment, learning, eloquence and dramatic power in his scientific
treatises as William Bullein. In his first book, The Gouvernement
of Healthe, we find a reflection generally considered the property
of Shakespeare:
In dede the poore sylly shepehard doth pleasantly pipe with his shepe,
whan mighty princes do fight amonge their subjectes, and breake manye
slepes in golden beds, whan bakers in bags and brewers in bottels, do snorte
upon hard strawe, fearing no sodaine mishappe.
In 1562, he produced Bullein's Bulwarke of Defence againste
Sicknes, Sorues, etc. , obviously modelling his title on Elyot's success-
ful Castel of Helth. Bullein's attitude to his subject can best be
expressed in the words of his own dedication ;
I beyng a child of the Commonwealthe am bounde unto my mother, that
is, the lande, in whom I am borne: to pleasure it with any good gift that it
hath pleased God to bestowe upon me, not to this ende to instructe the learned
but to helpe the ignoraunt, that thei maie resort to this little Bulwarke.
The book is divided into four separate treatises, the second in
the form of a dialogue, and it contains what he had learnt from
travel and study about herbs, surgery, the cultivation of health and
the practical part of a physician's work. But the scholars who were
carrying on this work of enlightenment had many other things of
which to tell the people besides remedies for their bodies. Although
the College of Physicians had been incorporated as early as 1518, the
position of medical men was far from established. Bullein ascribes
their low estate to the impostures and frauds of empirics and mounte-
banks? Here, again, the curtain is lifted which bides the low life of
1 Cf. Ep. Obsc. Virorum, vol. I, epp. 33 and 34.
## p. 108 (#130) ############################################
108 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
>
the Middle Ages, and, in a passage of bitter eloquence, we hear of
the escaped criminals, idle labourers and runaway serving-men
that sell worthless or poisonous drugs, practise witchcraft and
necromancy, doing more harm, according to Bullein, than limitours,
pardoners or vagabonds. The whole work has many digressions
and touches of autobiography. But the personal note is sounded to
most effect when the physician who had undergone the insult of a
prosecution for murder and was then languishing in prison for
debt, utters the lamenta beginning : ‘Truely there is none other
purgyng place or purgatorie but this'-not only in bodily suffer-
ing but in anguish of soul,
continuall thought, sometyme wishyng that Death might conquere life,
broken hart and vexed spirite, full of sondrie inwarde affections and alteracions
of minde, small rest or quietnes, sorowful for the death of kindred, or frendes,
being changed into bitter enemies, whiche is a greate plague.
The most important of Bullein's works, from a literary point of
view, is A Dialogue both pleasaunte and pieti full wherein is a
goodly regiment against the fever Pestilence with a Consolacion
and Comfort against death, of which the earliest extant copy is
dated 1564. Although no great plague had visited England for
many years, the congestion of the poor in cities made smaller visita-
tions a frequent occurrence. Yet none of the great physicians
before Gilbert Skene wrote anything that has come down to us
on the epidemics. But Bullein's tract is a great deal more than
one of the earliest treatises to suggest remedies for the plague. In
his hands, the Dialogue is hardly less than a drama of death. He
sketches twelve types of society as a physician would satirise them
in an age when death was rampant. The action is twofold. At
the beginning, the interest centres round the grasping money
maker Antonius, who is sinking fast, but keeps off the thought of
death by attaching Medicus to his person. Antonius, heretofore,
had contented himself with an otiose observance of religion, but is
now troubled by visions of hell. Medicus, unlike Halle's ideal
physician, is a cynical atheist, but, like Chaucer's prototype, makes
a fortune by attending the wealthy and neglecting the poor.
Between these two, the causes and cures of the fever are discussed.
This part of the Dialogue illustrates the transitional stage of the
science, which attributes fever to infected air and the ill health of
the patient, but also accepts eclipses of the moon as a probable
1A Dialogue betwene Sores and Chyrurgi, fol. vi.
Booke of Compoundes, fol. liiij. (Both the Dialogue and the Booke of Compoundes
are sections of the Bulwarke. )
## p. 109 (#131) ############################################
A Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence 109
cause, and varies such practical safeguards as cleanliness, gaiety
and avoidance of emotion with the most extravagant quackeries.
Two lawyers, Avarus and Ambodexter, hover round the fortune of
Antonius, speculating on his death and scheming to influence his
will. The scene then shifts to the home of a prosperous, self-
satisfied burgher, who with his wife and servant Roger are
travelling into the country to escape from the plague stricken
city, with its ringing bells and sounds of woe. The tedium of the
journey is beguiled by discussions on portents and comments on
the dishonesty of lawyers. Roger, a country wit, with the liberty
of the household jester, full of rustic wisdom and folklore, con-
tributes quaint stories and anecdotes after the manner of A C.
Mery Talys. They reach an inn where the wife's admiration
for the wall-paintings discloses a series of emblems passing in
review the abuses and evils of the age. Another traveller, Mendax,
joins them at dinner, and, through his extravagant accounts of
foreign lands, Bullein satirises not only Utopia but books of travel
and legend from Pliny, Isidore and Strabo to Sebastian Münster
and Boiastuau. They proceed on their journey, but black clouds
gather, thunder is heard, Roger flees, the wife hides and Mors
appears. Civis is warned in terrible words that his last hour has
come, and, after fruitless parleyings, is left with a mortal thrust to
write his will and, with the help of Theologus, to prepare his soul
for death. When the danger is past, Roger reappears, infinitely
disgusted that his own name does not appear in his master's will.
As the household is now broken up, he thinks of joining the
cozeners and vagabonds, but fears the gallows. If only he had
Civis's money he would soon make a sumptuous living by usury.
Thus, in one episode, Bullein satirises moneylenders and points out
the vagabonds' recruiting ground.
No summary can give an idea of the learning contained in the
Dialogue. The discussions range from Aristotle's theory of the
elemental forces to symbolic sketches of the chief English poets? .
Its satire reaches nearly every abuse of the age, and there are
passages of unmistakable eloquence and power. The influence of
the morality plays is obvious, but the true historical significance of
the tract consists in the fact that the thought has outgrown the
literary form. The dialogue was a medieval device to convey
1 This idea was far older than Bullein.
3 Vide Andrew Boorde, Dyetary of Helth, 1542; Bright, T. , Treatise of Melan-
cholie, 1586; T(homas) Walkington), The Opticke Glasse of Humors, 1605.
Epistulae obscurorum Virorum, 1st series, Mugister Conradus ad magistrum
Ortuinum Gratium.
## p. 92 (#114) #############################################
92 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
1
in sympathy with Plutarch, Plautus and Cicero: that is to say, of
jokes, witticisms, repartees and clinches. Thus, a large number of
Latin Facetiae appeared in print from the pens of fifteenth and
sixteenth century scholars. The style of narrative is strikingly
similar to the collections of Exempla, with which the Lativists,
thanks to their semi-ecclesiastical education, would be familiar.
These bons-mots and anecdotes diverted the student and the con-
troversialist by touches of common life or, at the most, by flashes
of classical wit. Their triviality ensured relaxation, but the scholar's
attention was held by an appeal to his sense of paradox and epigram.
This interest in witticisms and anecdotes soon spread to the
middle classes, whose habit of mind had for centuries been formed
by story-telling. The jongleurs and trouvères had preserved
‘those popular tales, which from time immemorial had circulated
among nations of Indo-European descent' and which continued to
find a place in all subsequent miscellanies down to the eighteenth
century. Ever since the Franciscans and Dominicans had used
apologues to enforce their exhortations, collections of Exempla
had been compiled from such sources as Vitae Patrum and
the Legends of the Saints. Gesta Romanorum had supplied
tales, mostly romantic, from obsolete Latin chronicles and German
legends. The sixteenth century still encouraged the medieval
love of the marvellous and heroic, but it also gave great impulse
to the half cynical, half amused indulgence which had always
greeted the triumphs of the knave, the blunders of the fool, the
flashes of the quick-witted and the innumerable touches of often
undignified nature which make the whole world kin. This in-
creased interest in the vagaries of one's neighbour was partly due
to the spread of education, which brought into clearer relief the
different grades of intelligence and stupidity. It also arose from the
growth of the city population, where legal maladministration often
reduced daily intercourse to a trial of wits. Moreover, the townsman
felt, though in a less degree than the scholar, the need for the relaxa-
tion of social intercourse. The minstrel and jester made a livelihood
and sometimes rose to fame? by gratifying this unromantic curiosity
in life; but the publication of Latin Facetiae had shown how
their place could be taken by jest-books printed in the native tongue.
These jest-books, in Italy, France, England and Germany, drew
largely on each other and even more on the inexhaustible stores
of the past, eschewing romantic and religious sentiment and
1 Courthope, History of English Poetry, vol. I, p. 63.
E. g. Scogan, Tarlton and Archie.
## p. 93 (#115) #############################################
>
Jest-books
93
reproducing only wit, ribaldry, satire and realism. The earliest
English jest-book, previous to most of the German miscellanies,
was in print by about 1526 under the title of A C. Mery Talys. This
miscellany covers practically the same ground as the Fabliaux,
treating of the profligacy of married women, the meanness and
voluptuousness of the priesthood, the superstition and crassitude of
the peasant, the standing jokes against feminine loquacity and
obstinacy, the resources of untutored ingenuity and the comedy of
the fool outwitted by the knave. All the tales are narrated with
a pointedness and simplicity which show how well English narrative
prose had learnt its lesson from Latin. Some of the anecdotes, to
modern taste, are merely silly or obscene. But a certain number,
following in the footsteps of the Latin Facetiae, harbour a sense
of wit and subtlety beneath apparent crudity. A more pro-
nounced leaning towards the new humanism is seen in Mery Tales
and Quicke Answeres (1535). The compiler draws less on medieval
stories and puts some of Poggio's facetiae and the tales of Erasmus's
Convivium Fabulosum and a selection from his Apophthegmata?
within reach of English readers. Latin quotations illustrate some
of the anecdotes, and the reflections, with which ‘jests' are fre-
quently concluded (probably in imitation of Exempla) are, in
some cases, more discursive. The twenty-eighth story ends with a
disquisition on dreams which already anticipates the essay.
Anecdotes and repartees, closely related to conversation and
practical jokes, tended to be associated with a personality. Joci
et Sales . . . ab Ottomaro Luscinio had appeared in 1529, and Facetie
et motti arguti di alcuni eccellentissimi ingegni et nobilissimi
signori, collected by Lodovico Dominichi, was published in 1548.
Following the example of the continent, English compilers soon
found it advantageous to put their jests and cranks on the market
associated with some character famous for humour or knavery.
Thus, we have the Merie Tales of Master Skelton, in which a
collection of extravagant anecdotes, associated with the laureate's
personality and his rectorship of Diss, is used to introduce clerical
burlesque such as the people loved. But the most perfect type
of biographical jest-book was registered in 1565–6, under the
title The Geystes of Skoggan. The kind of exploit which the
Fabliaux attributed to the 'clerc' is now attributed to the house-
hold jester. Amazing tales of dishonesty, insolence, and knavery
are collected from native and foreign sources, including two from
1 Vide De Vocht, H. , De Invloed van Erasmus op de Engelsche l'ooneelliteratur der
XVIe en XVIIe eeuwen. Ghent, 1908.
>
## p. 94 (#116) #############################################
94 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
the Markolf legend and one (in later editions) from Brantôme.
Several had already appeared in Mery Tales and Quicke Answeres.
These are skilfully woven into a continuous narrative, marking
definite progress in the scamp's career from his student days at
Oxford to a position at the courts of two monarchs, and thence
to his death. These licentious antics were probably not accept-
able, even in the rude and profligate court of Edward IV, in whose
reign the historic Scogan lived. But the jest-book was becoming
more democratic under German influence and pictured the priest-
hood and the nobility only as accessories to the buffoonery of low
life. So welcome was this coarser, more plebeian humour that
German jest-books were put on the market in English translations.
Der Pfarrer von Kalenberg was translated and adapted to English
ideas about 1510 and Eulenspiegell was translated from an
abridged Antwerp edition by William Copland under the title
of Howleglass, while the same printer produced an English
version of the old Danish tale of Rausch as Friar Rush. Such
tales as Skoggan's and Howleglass are a link between the jester
and the adventurer whose career was becoming a part of the
people's reading. Contempt for the routine of daily life is un-
mistakable. Howleglass's biographer goes so far as to say: 'Men
let alone and take no hede of cunning men yt dwel bi them; but
prefer them a litle or nought for ther labour nor be beloved: but
rural persones and vacabundes have all their desyre. ' In such
a sentiment, the levelling tendency of democracy has already
grown into sympathy with the picaro. But these gestes have no
literary kinship with Lazarillo de Tormes. Neither Howleglass,
The Parson of Kalenborowe, Skoggan nor Skelton has the in-
dividuality which suggests the novel. Moreover, they still move in
the distorted world of caricature, where the stupid are incredibly
stupid, and the lucky unnaturally lucky. In France, the jest-
book became a vehicle for all the wisdom and satire at Rabelais's
command. But in England, the fermentation of the age found
expression through other channels, and the jest-books only helped
to prepare the way for the detached literature of the seven-
teenth century by appealing to a sense of humour, wit and verbal
subtlety.
This sense found its fullest scope in criticism and ridicule.
Again, the literature of the sixteenth century, not yet conscious of
itself, had recourse to the past. Satires against certain localities
are among the features of the Middle Ages, when decentralisation
i Ste ante, p. 82. On the Eulenspiegel cycle, see Herford, C. H. , op. cit. chap. v.
## p. 95 (#117) #############################################
Riddles and Broadsides
95
gave counties and even towns the isolation of a separate country.
A monk of Peterborough in the twelfth or thirteenth century
satirised the inhabitants of Norfolk"; while satires are also found
concerning the people of Stockton and Rochester, and, at a later
period, on the inhabitants of Pevensey. 'Merry tales' were com-
posed or compiled on these lines for readers sufficiently intellectual
to laugh at folly. Germany set the example by producing, in the
sixteenth century, a collection of witticisms on Schildburg: the
inhabitants of this famous town are represented as experiencing
so much inconvenience from their far-famed wisdom that they
determine to establish a reputation for folly, a reputation which
still lives. A similar method of unifying anecdotes of stupidity
was adopted by the English in the reign of Henry VIII, when
Merie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotam appeared. The same type
of humour took a slightly different form in The Sack-Full of News,
a collection, mostly of bucolic ineptitudes, compiled for city readers
in an age when Barclay could say to the countryman: 'even the
townsmen shall laugh you to scorn. '
Jest-books did not efface a kindred form of miscellany-books
of riddles. Wynkyn de Worde printed Demaundes joyous, which
.
was chiefly an abridgment of Les demandes joyeuses; and the
Booke of Merry Riddles probably appeared before the earliest
known edition of 1600. These questions and answers enjoyed no
mean consideration as a mental training? , and, undoubtedly, helped
to form the standard of wit and conceit in later Elizabethau and
Jacobean times. The riddle books are full of such questions as:
"What is that that shineth bright of day and at night is raked up
in its own dirt? '—'The fire'; 'What is it that getteth his living
backward? '—'The ropemaker'; 'Of what faculty be they that
every night turn the skins of dead beasts? '—'The friars. ' In the
character writers, we meet with the same type of wit, only, in
them, it is reversed. Thus, in the Overbury collection, we read that
a serving man is a creature who, though he be not drunk, yet is not
his own man, and that the daily labour of a waterman teaches
him the art of dissembling because he goes not the way he looks.
In Micrologia, 'a player. . . is much like a counter in arithmetic and
may stand one while for a king, another while a beggar, many
times as a mute or cipher. In Butler, 'a melancholy man is one
that keeps the worst company in the world, that is, his own. '
1 Cf. Wright, T. , Early Mysteries and other Latin Poems, 1838.
This tendency begins to be marked before the sixteenth century by such books
as Mensa philosophica and Liber Paceti.
## p. 96 (#118) #############################################
96 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
The primary object of these anecdotes, facetiae and riddles was
to occupy idle hours. The English miscellanies are always 'merry';
and the foreign jest-books have even more suggestive titles. This
natural inclination for amusement, in which even elderly students
took refuge from over-work, had come down to the sixteenth cen-
tury with a love of singing and dancing? By 1510, Erasmus
declared that Britanni, praeter alia, formam, musicam et lautas
mensas, proprie sibi vindicent. Miles Coverdale”, in 1538, testifies
that the taste for singing was universal among carters, ploughmen
and women 'at the rockes' and spinning wheel. Words in metre
were composed to give a fuller zest to music and dancing, but the
conditions of their production were quite different from those
which evolved the folk-lore balladº. The change was inevitable
from the time the minstrel left the baronial hall for the city square.
The transformation became complete so soon as the invention of
printing made it more profitable to sell ballads than to sing them.
These fly-leaves and broadsides, specially produced for the occasion
and sold for a penny, have nearly all perished. Popular ones
were pasted on the wall and the less valued were devoted to more
ephemeral purposes. Both destinies led to annihilation, but the
demand for them must have grown rapidly, for, in the second decade
of the sixteenth century, the author of the Interlude of the Nature
of the Four Elements complains of the toys and trifles' printed in
his time; so that, while in English there were scarcely 'any works
of connynge,' the most ‘pregnant wits' were employed in compiling
'ballads and other matters not worth a mite. ' Henry VIII encour-
aged such productions in the early part of his reign but suppressed
them wholesale when any part of his policy was attacked. In 1533,
a proclamation was issued to suppress ‘fond books, ballads, rimes
and other lewd treatises in the English tongue. ' In 1543, an act of
parliament was passed to put a stop to the circulation of 'printed
ballads, plays, rimes, songs and other fantasies. ' 'At the beginning
of Mary's reign, an edict was made against ‘books, ballads, rimes
and treatises' which had been 'set out by printers and stationers,
of an evil zeal for lucre and covetous of vile gain. These sup-
pressions, added to the perishable nature of the product, have
destroyed all but about fifty-six ballads of the reigns from
Henry VIII to Elizabeth. But, by 1556, the Stationers' company
was incorporated and the development and nature of this primitive
>
1 See Chappell, W. , Popular Music of the Olden Time, vol. I, p. 253.
9 Encomium Moriae.
8 Address unto the Christian reader.
4 See vol. II, chap. XVII.
## p. 97 (#119) #############################################
Transition of Society
97
journalism is more easily traceable. From about 1560 to 1570,
about forty ballad-printers are registered, but, here again, the bulk
of their output has perished. The vast number of broadsides that
have come down to us belong to later periods, and owe their
existence to the labours of private collectors such as Selden,
Harley, Bagford and Pepys. Some of those still extant, which
date from the first two decades of Elizabeth's reign, continue the
spirit of the jest-books or reflect the sentiment of the 'botes'
and 'fraternityes,' but the greater number are akin to the new
spirit of Elizabethan and Jacobean times? .
We have seen in the foregoing summary how large a rearling
public still remained untouched by the renascence, and continued
to enjoy medieval literature, borrowing freely from France and
Germany. But, at the same time, the great social changes of the
sixteenth century were inspiring a large number of quite different
tracts. Trade was encouraged by both the Henrys, and the growing
taste for luxury, which ruined the gentry, enriched the commercial
classes. Moreover, the discovery of the New World added im-
mensely to the opportunities of making money. This commercial
activity seemed, to the moralists of the age, to be a rupture with
the good traditions of the past. In 1540–50, was printed
Charles Bansley’s Pryde and Abuse of Women, which belongs to
quite a different world of satire from that of The Schole-house of
Women or The Proude Wyves Paternoster. The coarse, picturesque
narrative is gone and, with it, the rough humour and caricature.
Bansley's invective is a sermon in verse.
He views female failings
in the light of the Seven Deadly Sins, and lashes their ostenta-
tion and vanity as Romish and inspired by the Devil. At
about the same time, a dialogue called The Booke in Meeter
of Robin Conscience was printed, in which Conscience remonstrates
first with his father, whose aim is to have abundance of worldly
treasure, then with his mother Neugise, who follows French
fashions and dresses like one nobly born, whereas the wife of
the previous century would never have ventured to rival the
gentlewoman's finery, and, lastly, with his sister, Proud Beauty,
who has mastered the essentials of cosmetics and delights to 'colly
and kis. '
A class which increases in wealth and importance does not
1 Broadside ballads are still sung in the streets of Paris during public holidays, and
can be heard any night at Les quat-z-arts and Le Grillon. As in former tinies, they
are the best indication of popular sentiment. The same survival is found in London
in the nineteenth century. Vide Hindley, C. , History oj the Cutnach Press, 1886.
E. L. III.
7
CH. V.
## p. 98 (#120) #############################################
98 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
stand still. Burghers began to marry their sons and daughters to
insolvent nobility, and Henry, who aimed at creating an aristocracy
dependent on himself, frequently recruited the diminished ranks of
the old peers from among burghers, lawyers and borough magis-
trates. This growth of the royal court at the expense of the
feudal castle filled London with raw courtiers", drawn from all
classes, who attached themselves to men of influence, partly to see
the world, and partly to advance their own fortunes under shelter
of a great name. Such a suddenly enriched or ennobled society
was not likely to be reconciled to the simple, rough life of their
forefathers. Luxury and excitement became necessities and re-
ceived their comment in contemporary literature. In 1530, the
Address in verse to new-fanglers was prefixed to Chaucer's
Assembly of Fowls. Wynkyn de Worde issued three editions of
A Treatise of a Gallant, which laments the pride, avarice and
ambition of the new fledged courtier and his love of quarrel. , The
tract deplores the influx of foreigners, whose phraseology was
corrupting the purity of the English idiom, and censures the
Englishman's admiration for French customs and French vices. At
this time, the example of Henry VIII and his sister Margaret made
dice and card-playing fashionable and the pleasures of gambling
gave great opportunities to the gentleman thief, who now became
a perpetual menace to society, and, in 1532, apparently, was
printed a Manifest detection of the most vyle and detestable
use of dice play and other practices like the same. This tract is
one of the first great exposures of the age, throwing into relief the
practices and resources of those who fall 'from the hardness of
virtuous living to the delicacy and boldness of uncareful idleness
and gainfull deceit. ' We learn how the provincial is met at Paul's
by a gentleman with three or four servants in gay liveries, an
acquaintance is cleverly established, the 'couzin' is unwittingly intro-
duced to the gaming-house and, eventually, he is fleeced. Elaborate
tricks to entice the 'couzin' with different kinds of cogged dice,
even the name of the most reliable maker, canting terms, the mode
of making cards and other forms of imposture and thievery, are all
made public. These disclosures are presented in a lively dialogue,
in clear, simple English. The sixteenth century love of anecdote
is gratified and the conversation is carried on between two well-
defined characters, the one a raw courtier, the other an ex-
perienced man of the world.
1 Cf. a poem by Richard Edwards in The Paradyse of Daynty Devises, beginning
In Youthfull yeares when first my young desires began
To pricke me forth to serve in court.
## p. 99 (#121) #############################################
Brinkelow's Complaynt of Roderyck Mors 99
as
The triumph of the reformation under Henry VIII and the
suppression of the monasteries had raised great hopes in those
churchmen who looked on Rome as the root of all evil. But the
disorganisation of society always brings abuses to the surface and
the venality of judges, the chicanery and delays of law-suits, the
tyranny of the powerful and the oppression of the poor and
defenceless now became doubly apparent. The prevailing clear-
sightedness as to the evils of both past and present found vigorous
expression in Brinkelow's Complaynt of Roderyck Mors. Brinke-
low's sectarian hatred of popery precludes the slightest regret for
the abolition of the old religion; in fact, he laments that the ‘body
and tayle of the pope is not banisshed with his name. ' At the
same time, his sense of justice and righteousness keeps his eyes
open to the fact that ecclesiastical and state administration' are no
better under the new order and that the social conditions are a great
deal worse. A marked feature of the tract is the constant appeal
to the king's divine authority to rectify social and legal abuses.
Henry's practice differed greatly from the ideas of his conscientious
supporters. The riches he appropriated from the monasteries
were not devoted to the relief of the economic situation,
Brinkelow urged him to use them (chap. XXII). Part went to the
king's middle class favourites, who now availed themselves of the
fall of noble families and the eviction of abbey-lands, to speculate
in agriculture and buy country estates. This upstart squirearchy
knew nothing of the old baronial practice of hospitality, and the
passing away of the ancient ideal added, in some measure, to the
pessimism of the times. Some ballads have come down to us
lamenting the new order, such as John Barker's, printed 1561,
with the burden :
Neibourhed nor love is none,
Treu dealyng now is fled and gone.
Besides neglecting the claims of good fellowship, the nouveau
riche introduced methods of commercial competition into land
speculation. The rearing of cattle was found to be more profitable
than the leasing of farms? . Thus, neither the lords of the manor
nor freehold tenants hesitated, when it was advantageous, to
abolish the small homesteads that had supported the yeomanry
1 Chap. XII, That kynges and lordes of presons should fynd their presoners suffycyent
fode at their charge : and of men that have lyen long in preson, &cete, is one of the first
signs of a literature which, in the next century, was to include The Blacke Dogge of
Newgate (c. 1600), The Compters Common-Wealth (1617), Essayes and Characters of a
Prison and Prisoners (1618), by Mynshul, and Wil Bagnal's Ghost (1655).
2 Traill, Social England, vol. II, chap. IX.
## p. 100 (#122) ############################################
100 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
of baronial England. Evicted tenants were forced to become
vagabonds or seek a livelihood in manufacturing industries, thus
further disorganising the labour market; and, all this while, the
reckless extravagance of the court raised the general cost of living,
and the debasement of the currency and increase of taxation made
poverty more acute.
Amid such disorder and suffering the modern spirit of com-
petition was ushered into the world, and contemporary literature
could see little but evil in the period of transition.
It was especially
the spectacle of men trampling on one another in the struggle for
wealth which roused Robert Crowley from the production of con-
troversial and religious tracts. Crowley was a printer, a puritan
and a famous preacher. Most of his pamphlets, sermons and
answers are composed for theologians; but the reading public was
sufficiently large and the influence of the press sufficiently universal
to make it worth his while to address the whole commons of the
realm in five popular tracts. In 1550, he boldly exposed the more
glaring social and moral abuses of the time in a series of short
verse essays, arranged in alphabetical order and entitled The
one and thirty epigrams. But, in spite of these devices, his
standpoint remains that of a Hebrew prophet and his style that of
a preacher. In The Voice of the Last Trumpet, which appeared in
the same year, he shows even more clearly how far his sectarian
training had unfitted him to handle problems of progress or social
reform. The tract is a methodical appeal to the different classes to
lay aside their peculiar sins; his view is still that of the Middle Ages,
and God is supposed to have placed barriers between the classes?
which no individual can cross without sin. Crowley warns his
readers not to stray from their class, but to let the gentry cultivate
learning, the commons obedience, and all will be well. In 1550, he
also printed The way to wealth, a graphic and searching enquiry
into the mutual hatred and distrust which existed between the rich
and the poor, showing how peasants attribute the late seditions to
farmers, graziers, lawyers, merchants, gentlemen, knights and lords,
while the upper classes—'the gredie cormerauntes ’-point to the
wealth and insolence of the peasantry. But he sternly warns the
lower classes against disobedience and covetousness, bidding them
be patient and not usurp the functions of their rulers. He rebukes
the clergy—“the shephardes of thys church'—for their lust of wealth,
11
1 Even in Dances of Death, such as that painted on the wall of the church of
La Chaise Dieu in Auvergne, and that at Basel, each individual takes precedence
according to his class. Wright, T. , History of Caricature and Grotesque, chap. XIII.
## p. 101 (#123) ############################################
6
The Hye Way to the Spyttel Hous IOT
but reserves his sharpest censure for the rich men who tyrannise
over the commons. In the following year he produced Pleasure
and pain, heaven and hell, an even more direct protest against
competition or, as Crowley calls it, the gredy rakeyng togyther of
the treasures of this vayne worlde,' which was widening the gulf
between rich and poor. Still writing for the large reading public,
he couched his expostulation in the attractive form of a poem
representing Christ's address to the world on the Last Judgment
Day. But the most interesting of Crowley's tracts is the In-
formacion and Peticion agaynst the oppressours of the pore
commons of this realme. In this address to the parliament of
Edward VI, the preacher fulminates against the rich in the language
of the Psalms and Isaiah. He draws a powerful picture of the
misery caused by the aggressions of the wealthy: how poverty makes
slaves of men and drudges or prostitutes of women, how youths are
reduced to beggary and, in the end, 'garnysh the galowe trees. '
Crowley had neither the intellectual equipment nor the literary
talent necessary to illuminate the perplexity and suffering of his
age. His five tracts simply give voice to the thoughts of those who
looked backward and cried 'order,' when they felt that the times
were out of joint.
In these and similar pamphlets one thing particularly arrests
the attention—the continual references to the ever increasing class
of beggars and vagabonds. As early as 1528, Simon Fish begins his
Supplication with these tremendous words :
Most lamentably compleyneth theyre wofull mysery unto youre highnes
youre poore daily bedemen, the wretched hidous monstres (on whome scarcely
for horror any yie dare loke), the foule unhappy sorte of lepres and other sore
people, nedy, impotent, blinde, lame and sike, that live onely by almesse, howe
that theyre nombre is daily so sore encreased that all the almesse of all the
weldisposed people of this youre realme is not halfe ynough for to susteine
theim.
The historic class of outlaws, vagabonds and pilgrims had
been enormously increased by the victims of falling prices and
decaying guilds. The phenomenon forces itself on the attention of
Robert Copland, who printed and probably composed The Hye Way
to the Spyttel Hous, after 1531. No work more clearly illustrates
the transitional state of English literature. Copland describes
himself as taking shelter from the rain in the porch of a spyttel
house and interrogates the porter on the inmates. The author
really wishes to describe the different types of fools and knaves;
but, instead of grouping them under a fraternity, boat or testament,
he chooses the spyttel house to serve as a frame, the picture con-
a
## p. 102 (#124) ############################################
102 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
taining those who knock for entrance. Under this heading, nearly
all the lower types of humanity are classed, not only the idle and
the lascivious, but busybodies and those who refuse to forgive their
neighbours or discipline their servants; even idle and domineering
wives are also among those who visit the hospital. Thus, in its
main conception, the book belongs to the general body of early
sixteenth century satire. But the tract is profoundly coloured by
the element of beggary. A hospital would not have been chosen as a
substitute for the traditional background unless poverty was a very
general curse, and we have a ghastly picture of the destitute
wretches who crave admission. In the first part of the dialogue,
the porter gives some amusing and graphic anecdotes of the tricks
of sham beggars, thus showing that Copland had caught a glimpse
of the boundless fields of comedy and humour which form part of
the realm of roguery.
Such was the state of the poor while the religious houses still
stood, but the suppression of the monasteries added to the army
of the unemployed and, at the same time, deprived the destitute of
the alms which had been expressly given in trust for them. Those
who had formerly looked to the religious houses for help were now
thrown upon society ; mendicancy became a recognised fact; and
legislation, while suppressing vagabondism, instituted compulsory
relief for the poor and needy. Such a system, badly administered
in a time of social disorganisation, led to inevitable abuse.
Pauperism became a profession exercised by ingenious impostors,
who perverted the administration of charity and, when occasion
offered, robbed travellers, stole horses out of pastures and hooked
linen out of house windows.
Vagabondism was a menace to society, and the curiosity which
people feel in anything alarming was satisfied in 1561 by Awdeley's
Fraternitye of vacabones. Again we see the power of literary
tradition. Awdeley, apparently, found no more appropriate title
than one as old as Wireker; but those who expected a satire on
social types assembled under this denomination were disappointed.
Under an old name, he followed up the idea of the German
Liber Vagatorum, and produced an anatomy of vagabond life
and vagrancy. The tract is divided into two parts; the first
consists of a series of concise definitions of thieves' cant and
contains startling revelations, how the “Abraham man' walks this
earth feigning madness and calling himself Poor Tom', how the
washman' lies in the highway with artificial sores produced by
i Compare King Lear, Act 11, sc. 4.
6
## p. 103 (#125) ############################################
Awdeley and Harman
103
spickwort or ratsbane and how these and suchlike impostors have
not only their own language but are organised into an independent
community with the 'upright man’ at their head, who domineers
over the society and takes the lion's share of the booty.
The most jejune of descriptions would be welcome when ac-
companied, as these were, by sensational disclosures of a mysterious
and dangerous class. But, in the second part—the company of
‘cousoners' and shifters-Awdeley deals with three types of the
gentleman thief. Here, the definitions which reveal the insidious
refinements of the well dressed adventurer necessarily expand into
narrative; but Awdeley was quite unconscious that he had found a
vein of humour and episode which has not even yet been exhausted.
His tales are concise explanations of a process of deception; his
only object is to give information.
All the opportunities which Awdeley missed are turned to the
fullest account by Thomas Harman. The writer, who describes
himself as a 'poore gentleman,' sought to supply the place of the sup-
pressed monasteries by keeping open house for mendicants. In
this charitable spirit, he came into personal contact with almost
every type of pauper, and gradually discovered that his compassion
was generally lavished on professional impostors. Having pene-
trated their depe dissimulation and detestable dealynge, beinge
marvellous suttle and craftye in their kynde,' he gave his dis-
coveries to the world in A Caveat or Warening for Commen
Corsetors, vulgarely called Vagabones. The book is put forward
as an 'alarum' to forewarn honest citizens; but, in reality, it
contains the researches of a sociologist. Harman alludes rather
ungratefully to Awdeley's superficial outline as 'A small breefe. . .
that made a lytle shewe of there names and usage, and gave a
glymsinge lyghte, not sufficient to perswade of their pevishe
peltinge. ' In twenty-four chapters, varying in length from a few
lines to several pages, Harman accumulated important data out of
which the character of thesixteenth century thief may be constructed.
We learn something as to their dress, food, origin, training and sexual
relations. The different departments of a highly specialised profes-
sion are explained. Their complicated frauds are fully investigated,
and we catch glimpses of the dark shallows of their private life. With
the instinct of a scientist, the author appends a list of the chief thieves
then living, and gives specimens and translations of their slang.
This spirit of philosophical enquiry is the first sign of modern
thought in a popular tract. But, in other respects, Harman's
work has the characteristics of his own age. He was writing for
## p. 104 (#126) ############################################
104 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
the public which read A C. Mery Tales and The Geystes of Skoggan;
so his book is enlivened with curious stories in illustration of thieves'
practices. The principle of recommending exposures to the masses
has been formulated by Erasmus quoniam autem rudis ac simplex
aetas huiusmodi fraudibus potissimum est obnoxia, visum est
exemplo non inamoeno depingere modum imposturae'. But
Harman has his full share of sympathy for a piece of successful
knavery, and he loves an episode which hinges on a trial of wits.
His anecdotes mark a pronounced advance on the stories of the
jest-books. The actors are no longer chessmen, who automatically
bring about a situation; they are living characters, and the author
adds to the interest of his book by interweaving personal ex-
periences with his pictures of mendicant life. In such stories as
that of the 'Roge' (cap. IV) and the 'Walking Morte' (cap. XIX), his
curiosity as to the eccentricities and humour of villainy effaces his
mission as an exposer of abuses.
Awdeley's and Harman's books, together with Liber Vagatorum,
have influenced a whole class of literature, from Greene's 'conny-
catching pamphlets' to The Prince and the Pauper. And yet
the Caveat does not anticipate the spirit of the picaresque novel.
Though attracted by knavery, Harman has no toleration for the
knave. 'Lewtering Luskes, lasy Lorells, rowsey ragged rabblement
of rakehells' are amongst his designations for this class, and his only
methods for 'reforming the criminal' are the stocks and the whip.
It is worth noticing that this work, a pamphlet of unquestioned
merit, is free from the literary ideals of the court. Harman
alludes contemptuously to this delycat age, and disclaims all
pretensions to eloquence, declaring that he has set forth his work
‘symplye and truelye, with such usual words and termes as is
among us wel known and frequented.
While the social miseries of England were inspiring a whole
literature of narrative and exposure, the sixteenth century spirit of
cosmopolitanism was also finding popular expression. Curiosity with
regard to other countries was by no means a creation of the age. The
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries produced short Latin descrip-
tions of the characteristics of different nations, and a series of pen
and ink caricatures of the Irish, Welsh and Gascons are found in
the margin of a document of the time of Edward I. But popular
interest in the continent received a new impulse during the sixteenth
century. The immigration of foreigners had, by 1517, become a
marked feature of Euglish commercial life, and the period from 1512
1 Preface to Colloquia familiaria.
## p. 105 (#127) ############################################
Cosmopolitanism. Andrew Boorde
Boorde 105
>
to 1558 is one of tentative exploration, which, though it produced no
startling mercantile discoveries, accustomed England to the idea of
the expansion of Europe, and helped to produce a revolt against
insnlarity. As early as The Nature of the Four Elements, de-
claringe many proper poynts of philosophy naturall and of dyvers
strange landys and of dyvers straunge effects and causes,' we have
a conception of cosmography serving as a basis for a morality
play. The production, apparently, found no imitators. But the
broadening of the national outlook is proved by the ever-increasing
number of allusions to foreign countries, in the tracts of the
timel.
The growth of cosmopolitan ideas found its expression in a
collection of essays on the chief nationalities and kingdoms of
Europe composed by the traveller and physician Andrew Boorde.
This work was finished by 1542, but was not published until 1547,
under the significant title of The Fyrste Boke of the Introduction
of Knowledge. Again we find a work of considerable merit pro-
bably intended to preface a universal encyclopaedia and yet
produced for a public which had not completely dissociated
popular literature from the grotesqueries of the former age.
Each chapter begins with a prologue in doggerel verse, spoken
by a typical member of the country under discussion, and illus-
trated by one of Copland's stock woodcuts. These verses are
intended to portray, and, in some cases, to caricature, what is
typical of each nation. Thus, the Englishman stands naked,
musing on what clothes he shall wear; the Fleming cheerfully
admits that he is sometimes 'drunken as a rat'; the Cornishman
expresses himself in half intelligible English; the Bohemian stands
by Wyclif and cares nothing for the pope; the Venetian is repre-
sented with money to pacify the Turks and the Jews. But the
Introduction is not merely a forerunner of the modern cartoon.
Verse and prose are intermingled as in Thomas's Historye of
Italye ; the doggerel prologues are followed by prose descriptions
in which the author discusses the geographical situation, the
produce and the ‘naturall dysposicion, that is to say, the culture,
religion and customs, of the inhabitants. He ends each enquiry
with information on the coinage, sometimes with a few specimens
of the language, and, in one or two cases, with directions for travel.
Like much of the popular literature of the sixteenth century, the
2
>
>
1 Such as Supplication for the Beggars, Complaynt of Roderyck Mors, Dialogue
between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset (n. d. ), Rede me and be not wrothe (1528), The
Boke named the Governour (1531), eto. , eto.
## p. 106 (#128) ############################################
106 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
Introduction stands between two ages ; it still retains the coarse
laughter and credulity of the past. Boorde believes that Merlin
built Stonehenge, and gravely records the legend of the White
Cock and Hen of St Domingo. But, at the same time, he has the
observation of an age conscious of progress. He notices the
advance of civilisation in different lands, and he understands
the importance of a country's natural resources. The economical
situation interests him; he observes that England is the land of
capital, and that Spain depends on her sea trade for wealth. He
has an eye for the poverty of people who, like the Welsh, are
still sunk in the squalor and ignorance of the Middle Ages. Any-
thing striking about the government attracts him, and the religious
situation frequently receives comment. And yet he has the indi-
vidualist's love of peculiarities. He notices the Irishman's device
for cooking, he reads that the Flemings eat frogs' legs and that
the Genoese are high in the instep.
Besides satisfying men’s curiosity in foreign lands, Boorde put
his medical knowledge and experience within reach of the unin-
itiated, by A Compendyous Regyment or a Dyetary of Helth. This
treatise on the cultivation of health, one of the earliest composed in
English, shows how quickly knowledge was spreading through the
middle classes. It was an age when the government insisted on
quarantine but neglected sanitation, and when Harrison believed
that the soot and smoke of chimneyless houses hardened the con-
stitution. Boorde was one of the first to see how greatly sanitation
influenced the well-being of man. The first part of his Dyetary,
really a separate treatise, shows how the secret of health is to
choose a convenient site or one's house. But the most striking
feature of his system deals with the reaction of the mind on the
body? In placing his house, a man should choose a congenial
prospect,
for and the eye be not satysfyed, the mynde cannot be contented. And the
mynde cannot be contented the herte cannot be pleased: if the herte and
mynde be not pleased nature doth abhor. And yf nature do abhor, morty-
fycacyon of the vytall and anymall and spyrytuall powers do consequently
foiowe.
In the second part of his treatise, Boorde gives practical advice
on such matters as sleeping, exercise and dress. He includes
an exhaustive examination of diet; but most of his purely
medical knowledge is still traditional. Yet, in scope and method,
>
Epistolae
1 Cf. Medici dicunt etiam quod sanum est quando aliquis est laetus.
Obscurorum Virorum, vol. I, ep. 9. Magister Conradus de Zuiccavia.
## p. 107 (#129) ############################################
William Bullein
107
the book is an effort to shake off the ignorance of the past and
apply to practical life the learning gathered in universities.
Boorde was not the only physician who advanced the culture
of his age. In those days, chirurgeons and doctors were, men of
general knowledge. Thomas Vicary insists that, besides his pro-
fessional training, a chirurgeon should be versed in natural
philosophy, grammar, rhetoric and abstract science. John Halle
adds astronomy, natural history and botany to the list. These
sciences were needed to equip the practitioner with the skill and
ability to put his own art to the fullest use. And thus the
physician kept in touch with the knowledge of his time. Robert
Recorde, said to have been physician to Edward VI and Mary,
wrote dialogues on arithmetic, geography, mensuration, astrology,
astronomny and algebra. But no writer has embodied so much
sentiment, learning, eloquence and dramatic power in his scientific
treatises as William Bullein. In his first book, The Gouvernement
of Healthe, we find a reflection generally considered the property
of Shakespeare:
In dede the poore sylly shepehard doth pleasantly pipe with his shepe,
whan mighty princes do fight amonge their subjectes, and breake manye
slepes in golden beds, whan bakers in bags and brewers in bottels, do snorte
upon hard strawe, fearing no sodaine mishappe.
In 1562, he produced Bullein's Bulwarke of Defence againste
Sicknes, Sorues, etc. , obviously modelling his title on Elyot's success-
ful Castel of Helth. Bullein's attitude to his subject can best be
expressed in the words of his own dedication ;
I beyng a child of the Commonwealthe am bounde unto my mother, that
is, the lande, in whom I am borne: to pleasure it with any good gift that it
hath pleased God to bestowe upon me, not to this ende to instructe the learned
but to helpe the ignoraunt, that thei maie resort to this little Bulwarke.
The book is divided into four separate treatises, the second in
the form of a dialogue, and it contains what he had learnt from
travel and study about herbs, surgery, the cultivation of health and
the practical part of a physician's work. But the scholars who were
carrying on this work of enlightenment had many other things of
which to tell the people besides remedies for their bodies. Although
the College of Physicians had been incorporated as early as 1518, the
position of medical men was far from established. Bullein ascribes
their low estate to the impostures and frauds of empirics and mounte-
banks? Here, again, the curtain is lifted which bides the low life of
1 Cf. Ep. Obsc. Virorum, vol. I, epp. 33 and 34.
## p. 108 (#130) ############################################
108 Progress of Social Literature in Tudor Times
>
the Middle Ages, and, in a passage of bitter eloquence, we hear of
the escaped criminals, idle labourers and runaway serving-men
that sell worthless or poisonous drugs, practise witchcraft and
necromancy, doing more harm, according to Bullein, than limitours,
pardoners or vagabonds. The whole work has many digressions
and touches of autobiography. But the personal note is sounded to
most effect when the physician who had undergone the insult of a
prosecution for murder and was then languishing in prison for
debt, utters the lamenta beginning : ‘Truely there is none other
purgyng place or purgatorie but this'-not only in bodily suffer-
ing but in anguish of soul,
continuall thought, sometyme wishyng that Death might conquere life,
broken hart and vexed spirite, full of sondrie inwarde affections and alteracions
of minde, small rest or quietnes, sorowful for the death of kindred, or frendes,
being changed into bitter enemies, whiche is a greate plague.
The most important of Bullein's works, from a literary point of
view, is A Dialogue both pleasaunte and pieti full wherein is a
goodly regiment against the fever Pestilence with a Consolacion
and Comfort against death, of which the earliest extant copy is
dated 1564. Although no great plague had visited England for
many years, the congestion of the poor in cities made smaller visita-
tions a frequent occurrence. Yet none of the great physicians
before Gilbert Skene wrote anything that has come down to us
on the epidemics. But Bullein's tract is a great deal more than
one of the earliest treatises to suggest remedies for the plague. In
his hands, the Dialogue is hardly less than a drama of death. He
sketches twelve types of society as a physician would satirise them
in an age when death was rampant. The action is twofold. At
the beginning, the interest centres round the grasping money
maker Antonius, who is sinking fast, but keeps off the thought of
death by attaching Medicus to his person. Antonius, heretofore,
had contented himself with an otiose observance of religion, but is
now troubled by visions of hell. Medicus, unlike Halle's ideal
physician, is a cynical atheist, but, like Chaucer's prototype, makes
a fortune by attending the wealthy and neglecting the poor.
Between these two, the causes and cures of the fever are discussed.
This part of the Dialogue illustrates the transitional stage of the
science, which attributes fever to infected air and the ill health of
the patient, but also accepts eclipses of the moon as a probable
1A Dialogue betwene Sores and Chyrurgi, fol. vi.
Booke of Compoundes, fol. liiij. (Both the Dialogue and the Booke of Compoundes
are sections of the Bulwarke. )
## p. 109 (#131) ############################################
A Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence 109
cause, and varies such practical safeguards as cleanliness, gaiety
and avoidance of emotion with the most extravagant quackeries.
Two lawyers, Avarus and Ambodexter, hover round the fortune of
Antonius, speculating on his death and scheming to influence his
will. The scene then shifts to the home of a prosperous, self-
satisfied burgher, who with his wife and servant Roger are
travelling into the country to escape from the plague stricken
city, with its ringing bells and sounds of woe. The tedium of the
journey is beguiled by discussions on portents and comments on
the dishonesty of lawyers. Roger, a country wit, with the liberty
of the household jester, full of rustic wisdom and folklore, con-
tributes quaint stories and anecdotes after the manner of A C.
Mery Talys. They reach an inn where the wife's admiration
for the wall-paintings discloses a series of emblems passing in
review the abuses and evils of the age. Another traveller, Mendax,
joins them at dinner, and, through his extravagant accounts of
foreign lands, Bullein satirises not only Utopia but books of travel
and legend from Pliny, Isidore and Strabo to Sebastian Münster
and Boiastuau. They proceed on their journey, but black clouds
gather, thunder is heard, Roger flees, the wife hides and Mors
appears. Civis is warned in terrible words that his last hour has
come, and, after fruitless parleyings, is left with a mortal thrust to
write his will and, with the help of Theologus, to prepare his soul
for death. When the danger is past, Roger reappears, infinitely
disgusted that his own name does not appear in his master's will.
As the household is now broken up, he thinks of joining the
cozeners and vagabonds, but fears the gallows. If only he had
Civis's money he would soon make a sumptuous living by usury.
Thus, in one episode, Bullein satirises moneylenders and points out
the vagabonds' recruiting ground.
No summary can give an idea of the learning contained in the
Dialogue. The discussions range from Aristotle's theory of the
elemental forces to symbolic sketches of the chief English poets? .
Its satire reaches nearly every abuse of the age, and there are
passages of unmistakable eloquence and power. The influence of
the morality plays is obvious, but the true historical significance of
the tract consists in the fact that the thought has outgrown the
literary form. The dialogue was a medieval device to convey
1 This idea was far older than Bullein.
